2 Cents Worth Down Under.
Explore everything from Ballet & Boyz, to People & Pop with me. With a healthy dose of gorgeous lads. Oh.. and some Wonder Woman!

Thursday, 31 January 2013

Stoned For Having Short Hair....

The Haredim are no better than Al-Qaeda and those Islamist extremists....

Stoned for having short hair

Date

January 30, 2013 - 11:59PM

Ruby Hamad - Writer

The face of extremism ... across Jerusalem posters featuring women have been defaced by ultra-Orthodox Haredim. Photo: AP

To distinguish itself from its predominantly Muslim
neighbours, Israel has long marketed itself as the ‘Middle East’s only
democracy’. Recent campaigns by the government, for example, have
heavily promoted Israel’s liberal gay rights laws to enhance its
reputation as a progressive nation.But this carefully cultivated image hides a rising anti-woman
conservatism (centred mostly in Jerusalem) that demonstrates how
women’s oppression transcends borders and cultures, and has led some to declare that the biggest threat to Israel comes not from without but within.Early this month, Israeli news website, Ynet, reported that a
17 year old girl had been attacked by a gang of Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox
Jewish) youths, who threw rocks at her at a bus stop outside their Yeshiva (religious school).

Women in Beit Shemesh, Israel's Jerusalem District.

According to the girl, she was targeted because of her short
hair, ‘They were yelling ‘lesbian’ and ‘is it a boy or a girl?’…They
were judging me based on my appearance.’

Far from an isolated incident, this is the latest in a long
line of attacks on women that are motivated by an ideology that, despite
Israel’s reputation for liberalism, mirrors that of its most hardline
neighbours.

One of the fastest growing groups In Israel, the Haredi make
up ten percent of the population. By 2025, they will be at 25 percent.
Like other conservative monotheistic (i.e. patriarchal) faiths, Jewish
Ultra-Orthodox have strict beliefs regarding the role and status of
women who are valued above all else for their ‘modesty.’

Although ‘modesty’ can have several interpretations, the
Haredi version, much like the Saudi-Arabian led Wahhabi strain of Islam,
seems centred on making women as invisible as possible. As the Haredi population grows, so too do campaigns to
segregate Jerusalem’s streets, supermarkets and buses. One woman earned
herself the moniker ‘Israel’s Rosa Parkes’
when she refused to move to the back of the bus at the insistence of a
Haredi man who ‘told the driver it was his right to have her sit in the
back and that he had paid to be able to do so.’

Other incidents include schoolgirls as young as 8 being spat on by men who objected to their ‘immodest clothes.’ Just as disturbing is the push to remove all images of women from the public sphere.
Over the last few years, advertisers have responded to religious
pressure and relentless vandalism by quietly disappearing women from
Jerusalem’s advertising billboards.

Predictably, these calls for women’s modesty, much like in
conservative Islam, come primarily from men. In a recent instruction
manual, Rabbi Schlomo Aviner, who is, according to Ynet, ‘one of the
strictest Religious Zionism leaders when it comes to women's modesty’,
revealed a strict new dress code to be taught to girls from the age of
3. Emphasising loose, dark clothing and braided hair, the rabbi
declares, ‘Hiding the body respects the soul, which is the essence of
the human being.’ Given such lofty virtues, why do neither Jewish nor Muslim
leaders write long-winded sermons praising similar levels of modesty in
men?

The answer is simple. Modesty is an indication of how women
are still devalued simply for being female. Even Western, Christian
women are not immune to being judged by the amount of skin they don’t
show. Just look at the growth of American Christian websites such as
America’s Is This Modest? where grown men judge and analyse the clothing choices of teenage girls.

Men it seems, by virtue been born male, can find their worth
in other ways: work, religious study, their miraculous penises. But
women? Their shame of simply being born female can only be overcome by
following strict rules on appropriate dress and behaviour that conceal
as much of their femaleness as possible. The message is clear: The less overtly woman you are, the more invisible you make yourself, the better woman you are.

This obsession with female modesty isn’t about preventing
illicit sex. It is about restricting women’s freedom and denying them
positions of power and influence. When segregation of sexes is enforced
it is never men but women who are kept out of public places on the
ostensible (i.e. bullshit) fear that their mere presence will cause all
men lose control of their sexual desires. Recall that New York newspaper
catering to ultra-orthodox Jews that removed Hillary Clinton’s image from the famous photograph taken in the White House during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Most infuriating is the false flattery employed
to convince women to participate in their own oppression. Again we look
to Rabbi Aviner, who gushes, ‘How wonderful and pleasant is the modesty
of the Jewish woman. So much nobility and respect, purity and
sacredness.’

To see where such misplaced adulation leads, look no further
than the so-called Taliban Women of the Beit-Shemesh neighbourhood of
Jerusalem, who have taken to wearing black, burqa-like garments to protect their modesty:

‘I don't want men to look at me. I'm happy being modest. In
the past, I felt uncomfortable to walk around in such a wanton fashion.
At first, I just wore a wig. Now, when I see a woman with a wig I pray
to G-d to forgive her for wearing that "thing" on her head.

It’s a familiar scenario; women pitted against each other to
meet unrealistic male expectations of how women should dress and behave.
In their desire to out-modest each other,
some of these women ­–who are often mistaken for Muslims and yelled at
in the streets– have taken to wearing a cone-like object on their heads
under their veil to conceal their human form. Let me repeat that. To meet expectations of what makes a
’good’ woman, these women wear contraptions on top of their heads to
hide their humanity and give themselves an alien-like appearance.

Although these women -who are actually criticised by other
Ultra-Orthodox- choose to dress this way they do so in an environment
where they are relentlessly informed by mostly male religious leaders
that a woman’s worth is entirely dependent on her modesty. The burqa can
only exist in an unequal world that judges women by entirely different
criteria to men.

The nature of women’s oppression, whether in Israel, Saudi
Arabia or the English-speaking West, all stems from the obsession with
controlling women's sexuality. To judge a woman solely on her ‘modesty’ and her even more
dangerous sister 'purity' is to create a society that regards women’s
bodies as shameful secrets that must be covered up at all costs, and
fools women into believing that distorting their bodies is the only way
to make up for the shame of simply being a woman.

I challenge ANYONE to tell me that the Haredim are following HaShem's laws.

I notify you that my response will involve you - me - a locked room and the HEAVIEST Torah I can find.... you will be hurt....

3 comments:

G
said...

I'm almost ashamed to say I had no idea about any of what you just revealed to me. It is so wrong that even though I am disgusted, I am not surprised. How I wish I could be surprised. All of it takes my mind to thoughts of the treatment of Australian Aborigines and African Americans of the past. It is appalling that in 2013, with all that has passed before us, still everywhere in this world so many are still so firmly locked in beliefs of superiority, all of which are entrenched in man-made theological perspectives. Of course I have no answer but I understand your anger.

Which brings to mind the piece on the front page of yesterday's NYTimes..."Modesty In Ultra Orthodox Brooklyn Is Enforced by Secret Squads"...Brooklyn! Forcing shop keepers to remove mannequinds from their windows as too provocative, even entering homes and confiscating computers and ipads, that they believe contain "unsuitable" material...eeesh...